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Thursday, March 28, 2013

`We Are Wiser Than We Were Before'

“Lovely”
is a word used sparingly by Yvor Winters in his critical judgments, though it aptly
applies to lines in many of his own poems. Remember the opening of “Time and the Garden,” words that often accompany me on walks:

“The
spring has darkened with activity.

The
future gathers in vine, bush, and tree:

Persimmon,
walnut, loquat, fig, and grape,

Degrees
and kinds of color, taste, and shape.”

These
are dense, deft lines spoken by a poet proud of his gardens, poetic and
horticultural. Or read again “A Summer Commentary.” Never a “nature poet” in
the banal, Mary Oliver sense, Winters loved the natural world without
sentimentalizing it:

“Amid
the rubble, the fallen fruit,

Fermenting
in its rich decay,

Smears
brandy on the trampling boot

And
sends it sweeter on its way.”

In
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1946), Winters
says the poem I wrote about in Wednesday’s post, “Isaac and Archibald,” is “a
kind of New England pastoral and is extraordinarily lovely.” He quotes with
approval William James saying “Isaac and Archibald” is “fully as good as
anything of the kind in Wordsworth.” Better, I should say, less mushy, romanticized
and self-dramatizing. In the same paragraph, Winters praises another Robinson
work, “Aunt Imogen,” as “a domestic poem of similar quality and similar
excellence.” The narrator, referring to a little boy, the title character’s
nephew, says, “Young George knew things,” and so does Robinson. Childless, a
lifelong bachelor, his insights into our habitual vulnerability can make for
uncomfortable reading. Imogen, too, is unmarried and without children. Her nieces
and nephews adore their aunt, leaving her bewildered:

“It
puzzled her to think that she could be

So
much to any crazy thing alive—

Even
to her sister’s little savages

Who
knew no better than to be themselves.”

While
cuddling George, her nephew confesses that “life was a good game— / Particularly
when Aunt Imogen / Was in it.” His innocent declaration of love devastates
Imogen:

“And
something in his way of telling it—

The
language, or the tone, or something else—

Gripped
like insidious fingers on her throat,

And
then went foraging as if to make

A
plaything of her heart. Such undeserved

And
unsophisticated confidence

Went
mercilessly home; and had she sat

Before
a looking glass, the deeps of it

Could
not have shown more clearly to her then

Than
one thought-mirrored little glimpse had shown,

The
pang that wrenched her face and filled her eyes

With
anguish and intolerable mist.”

Robinson
understands Imogen’s fragility. A child’s love makes its absence in her life
undeniable. Among other guides to Robinson’s emotional terrain are Wharton and
James. One thinks of Catherine Sloper in the final sentence of Washington Square, who, “picking up her
morsel of fancy-work, had seated herself with it again — for life, as it
were." Robinson writes of Imogen:

“Some
grief, like some delight,

Stings
hard but once: to custom after that

The
rapture or the pain submits itself,

And
we are wiser than we were before.”

Winters
writes of Robinson late in his monograph:

“…his
closest spiritual relatives, at least in America, are to be found in the
writers of fiction and of history in his generation and the two or three
generations preceding. I have called attention to his having certain more or
less Jamesian vices as a narrator, but I am thinking now of his virtues: of the
plain style, the rational statement, the psychological insight, the subdued
irony, the high seriousness and the stubborn persistence. In respect to one or
another of these qualities, one may find him related to such a mind as that of
Henry James, but perhaps more obviously to Edith Wharton and Motley and Francis
Parkman, and perhaps even at times to Henry Adams. He is, it seems to me, the
last great American writer of their tradition, and not the first of a later one;
and the fact that he writes verse is incidental...Robinson is more closely
comparable to the great masters of prose than to the minor poets.”